Kindle and other E-readers

Who knows? The ways of tanners and hide-crafters are beyond me. What I really want is a nice handtooled bullhide tableau vivant of the cast of Waterworld, preferably in Wine. Or a nice portrait of say, Steve Buscemi. Or a revisionist tableau with Steve Buscemi starring in Waterworld. Can you hook me up?

Its probably all chromium tanned stuff. Mid-tier, shop-dyed leather would be fine though, and would only offend the tactile palette of your most collagen stabilization sensitive friends. I don't want to cast aspersions on what looks to be a fine shop.

I do actually have some 6oz elderly cowhide in my shop, though it wouldn't take handtooling very well. That is the closest I would have to something with a bull vibe. Otherwise, all I have at hand is a panoramic calfskin onlay of the Gnomemobile in the Grand Canyon. I could do Buscemi in brown pebbled goat. I could center his face on the spine so that he would smile when you open the book.

Its probably all chromium tanned stuff. Mid-tier, shop-dyed leather would be fine though, and would only offend the tactile palette of your most collagen stabilization sensitive friends. I don't want to cast dispersions on what looks to be a fine shop.

Such persons are my only friends. It's my one and only criterion for amity. (Are dispersions cast in the same way and with the same shoulder mechanics as aspersions--i.e. thumb on the seams, pinky and index across the seams??)

I thought you had used the phrase "cast dispersions" instead of the correct "cast aspersions." But the joke was on me as I decided to check and found out that "dispersions" is much more common than I had thought. I came back here to apologize for being a grammar ass and found out you'd changed it (or so I thought).

I'd like to somehow file this under the Overstreet mistake thread and move along.

Does Borders have its own e-reader, like B&N's the Nook? I keep getting Borders e-mails hyping a coming e-book store, or section, and publicizing some e-reader, the name of which I don't recognize. I've seen Sony e-readers at the brick-and-mortar Borders before.

OK, wait. Just pulled up one of the e-mails, which do publicize the Sony unit but also something called the Kobo, which isn't available yet but will be by Father's Day. Read all about it.

I've posted many times about the demise of book-review sections, particularly the Washington Post's Book World, but nothing's turning up in the search engine. If anyone can help the *moderator* of this forum find those old threads , he'd appreciate it.

Some questions, then, to serve as boundary stones for the ramble ahead: Is it true, as many people who have commented on the matter have claimed, that the recent decline in newspaper books coverage is a problem for the culture at large, and also representative of larger cultural problems? Are review sections disappearing or shrinking because they can't turn a profit? Or is it because they can't compete with material originating on the web? Why are weekly and monthly magazines, despite producing a bounty of thoughtful essays and reviews about books, generally left out of the conversation about books coverage? And finally, as for quality books coverage— by which I mean not reviewery but scrutiny, the deliberate, measured analysis of literary and intellectual questions without obvious or easy answers—can such coverage originate online and also find a loyal audience there? ...

It's necessary to explain these broad economic trends to understand a crucial and overlooked point—namely, that it is disingenuous for newspaper executives to justify the elimination or reduction of the book beat by claiming that books sections don't turn a profit. Undeniably, the executives' math is correct. A newspaper books section, if one were to total up its costs, loses money. But does not the sports section or the metro section? Yet of all the sections that fail to turn a profit on their own, it's the books section that is most often killed or pinched. Claims that books sections are eliminated or downsized because they can't earn their keep are bogus. It is indisputable that newspapers have been weakened by hard times and a major technological shift in the dissemination of news; it is not indisputable that newspaper books coverage has suffered for the same reasons. The book beat has been gutted primarily by cultural forces, not economic ones, and the most implacable of those forces lies within rather than outside the newsroom. It is not iPads or the Internet but the anti-intellectual ethos of newspapers themselves.

"Anti-intellectual" is a hefty allegation, but bear with me as I substantiate it with a few stories from the newsroom and observations about the response of newspaper books sections to some important publishing trends of the past several decades. First, a definition. In a news context, "anti-intellectual" does not necessarily mean an antipathy to ideas, though it can be that too. I use the word "anti-intellectual" to describe a suspicion of ideas not gleaned from reporting and a lack of interest in ideas that are not utterly topical. ...

Journalists have long been enthralled by the buzz and glamour of book publishing, but as a subject it is a poor substitute for quality books coverage. One exception is the Barnes & Noble Review, a web-only venture that generally avoids gossip and trade talk. It is better edited than any newspaper books section, but it also happens to be owned by the country's largest corporate chain bookstore. Neither the quality of its reviews nor the generosity of its writers' fees can expunge from its pages its innate commercialism.

The writer is making a case, I think, that magazines are better suited to book reviews than are breaking-news-oriented publications like newspapers and news Web sites, but he offers a very mixed picture that doesn't give me a lot of hope for the future of book reviews. Still, I always love reading the book reviews in the Atlantic more than anything else in that magazine, and I like The New Republic's new The Book section of its site. I always look at the book reviews in the Weekly Standard with keen interest, but the titles usually aren't of much interest.

Olive Tree's NIV Bible BibleReader is the highest-grossing iPhone Bible app right now, too, ranked second in books just behind Green Eggs and Ham. Between the iPhone and iPad, including free versions, Haninger said his company is getting 3,000 downloads a day. The iBible may not exactly be iBeer in its heyday, but sales on the iPad are growing, Haninger said, as the device has passed 3.5 million units sold. (Atlantic colleague Eleanor Barkhorn also pointed out to me that the NIV is considered to be the more "conservative" Bible translation and less likely to be used at more liberal mainline churches.)

The rest of the top-selling book applications also suggest that the iPad isn't solely being purchased by young guys with cash to burn. The paid app list is dominated by Toy Story and Dr. Seuss titles! Anecdotally, parents seem to love the iPad for the child pacification magic tricks it can perform. A study by the consumer research firm, MyType, found that parents were more likely than non-parents to own an iPad.

There's a 3rd generation Kindle on the way. It's lighter, faster, longer battery life, sharper display, smaller with twice as much storage. This one also comes complete with WiFi for $189. A version with WiFi only is also on the way at $139 which is cheaper than B&N's Nook and Sony's Reader.

The Nook is definitely being taken seriously by Amazon (thus the $139 and $189 price points of the Kindle, $10 less than the $149 and $199 Nooks). And for good reason -- the Nook is a very cool device. I test-drove one last night at my downtown Barnes and Noble, and it is pretty freakin' sweet. Especially because it takes the first tentative steps towards what I prayed for earlier:

The next step, I feel, would be for Borders to allow me to browse their shelves of printed materials and then buy e-books/magazines using a port there in the store. I have a Borders a block from my workplace, I would do this All The Time if I could. But this is probably a decade away.

I love thee possibility of walking the aisles of a Barnes and Noble and browsing their shelves, and then checking if the book is available for Nook on the free, fast Wi-Fi. I hope this does not make me a total geek -- no wait, I'm past that.

Kindle books are generally Mobifiles. If you check out the Mobipocket ebook creator (free software) you'll find you can import Word files saved as website and several other file types and convert them into mobi files; you're supposed to be able to convert PDFs with that software, too, but I've not been able to get it to work for me. However, there are other converters out there (I use something called the Auto Kindle eBook converter and, beyond Windows asking for confirmation every time I use it, I've not had any trouble with it).

The biggest problem with the second program is that, depending on your PDF file, the formatting can get really badly messed up and result in something that's ugly and nigh-unreadable. Still, it's better/easier to read than an unconverted PDF on your Kindle.